After Spotify, YouTube joins ongoing music streaming battle in India

Indian music streaming market has been growing and it is attracting global giants. After Swedish music streaming firm Spotify entry last fortnight, Google-owned YouTube has officially launched its music streaming services YouTube Music (ad-supported) and YouTube Music Premium (ad-free).

YouTube Music promises to offer songs, albums, personalised playlists, live performances, and music videos. It has recommendation built as per customer requirement.

YouTube also has a paid membership YouTube Music Premium services available at Rs 99, which allows offline downloads and an ad-free experience, as per its blog.

Google Play Music subscribers get free access to YouTube Music Premium.

Further to extend the features of YouTube Music Premium beyond the music app, It has also introduced YouTube Premium at Rs 129.

The app has been downloaded for over 100 million times globally on Android.

“We are hoping to bring the best in global and Indian music to millions of fans across India, and give them an immersive music experience, with the magic of music on Youtube,” said Lyor Cohen, Global Head of Music, YouTube.

In February last, Spotify had launched its services in India. It has been offering premium subscription plans starting at Rs 13 for daily and Rs 119 for a monthly subscription. To attract young population, it’s giving a 50 per cent discount to students.

The streaming giant claimed to have 1 million downloads in a week of launch.

Apart from Spotify, YouTube Music will have to compete against rivals such as Times Internet-owned Gaana, Wynk, Amazon Prime and Reliance’s JioSaavn.

Online music listening market is expected to cross $273 million by March 2020, as per Deloitte’s research. At present, there are more than 150 million online consumers on online streaming apps.

Gaana and JioSaavan lead the market with over 100 million monthly users.

Meanwhile, what can act as a favour for YouTube is its huge user base in India. It has about 245 million monthly active users in the country and hailed as a default search engine for videos.

Launched four years ago, YouTube Music has been available in 29 countries. It will be interesting to see how it will fair in a fast-growing market like India that counts stakeholders including Tencent (via Gaana), Xiaomi (via Hungama), Spotify and Jio.

About Author

Jitendra has spent more than seven years in journalism. He had been founding-member of content startups such as Newzstreet, Indiasamvad and iamwire. Prior to that he did long, deeply reported feature stories for The Indian Express and handled desk at IANS. Born in Bokaro, he holds a Bachelor of Mass Media (Journalism) degree from ISC, Pune. He currently resides in New Delhi, where he moved nearly seven years ago. Among the things that excite him is wonder about life and its creative potential in every sphere.